Public Lives

If It's June 16, This Must Be Bloomsday

By JAN HOFFMAN

Published: June 16, 2004

STATELY, plump Isaiah Sheffer rises each morning around 6:30, but every June 16, it is his custom not to dress in green. That's the anniversary of the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom, the fictional Irish Jew in James Joyce's "Ulysses," walks through the streets of Dublin and his own interior life. Although Joyce pungently described a certain green as the color of Irish poets, Mr. Sheffer explains that to wear it, especially on this centennial of Bloomsday, would be a faux pas.

"Joyce wanted the cover of 'Ulysses' to be blue and white, to represent the flags of Greece and the Jews," says Mr. Sheffer, the host of the NPR program "Selected Shorts," as well as a librettist, playwright, director, Yiddishist, impresario of the cultural center Symphony Space and host of the nation's largest celebration of Bloomsday.

So this morning, Mr. Sheffer will don white trousers, a blue shirt and a white tie. Then, for the 23rd year, he will head over to Symphony Space on the Upper West Side to preside over a noon-to-past-midnight exaltation of the novel that the undergraduate Tennessee Williams called "the most deliberately pretentious work of art I have ever come across." (The quotation comes from "yes I said yes I will Yes," a deliciously readable and, thankfully, slender new collection of commentary about Joyce himself, the novel and Bloomsday celebrations, edited by Nola Tully with an introduction by Mr. Sheffer.)

This year, "Bloomsday on Broadway," which will be broadcast on Pacifica stations in New York and San Francisco, will feature Irish music, a faint clatter of ale bottles and more than 100 actors reading snippets and swaths of the novel, concluding with Fionnula Flanagan's uncensored rendition of the almost unpunctuated Molly Bloom/Penelope soliloquy. Reactions to the book by Joyce's contemporaries will also be read. Mr. Sheffer will quote the analyst Carl Jung: "I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman. I didn't."

But the question is put to Mr. Sheffer, a Bronx-born son of immigrants from Russia, a child actor in the Yiddish theater and author of, among other works about Jewish life, a play about Isaac Bashevis Singer to honor the centennial of that writer's birth next month: Why Joyce? "Bloom is the greatest Jewish character in all of literature," Mr. Sheffer replies, in that loamy, mellifluous voice familiar from "Selected Shorts," his 20-year-old program of marquee names reading short stories. "Who's the competition? Shylock?"

As a young man, he entered the novel through Stephen Dedalus, the poet whose mother, like Mr. Sheffer's, had died; when Mr. Sheffer became the father of a daughter (he is married to Ethel, an urban planner), he entered "Ulysses" through Bloom, father of Milly.

"I'm not a scholar, I'm a passionate theater person," maintains Mr. Sheffer, who tracked down the original tunes for the song fragments woven into Molly Bloom's thoughts.

To take a four-hour stroll around the mind of Mr. Sheffer, 68, as he eases back on a couch in his office at Symphony Space - the two-theater home to a crazy salad of performers that he compelled, litigated and charmed into being - is to be left rather breathless from mental exercise. Now he's recounting Bloomsdays past ("One year we read the last three pages of Molly in 11 languages. Ah, the Russian: 'da!... Da!... DA!' "). Then he's on to his "Selected Shorts" literacy project; an opera about the Constitutional Convention; a cabaret of political satire; his Wall to Wall marathons; and the Singer play.

The talk is light and swift. For a person of accomplishment, Mr. Sheffer is the antithesis of pomposity. ("I regret never having learned to play a musical instrument," he says.) He is funny - one pen name is Jerzy Turnpike - and generous about credit. "I work with department heads who make me look good," he says. "I'm just the chief bottle washer." Small wonder that as a producer, artistic director and fund-raiser, he attracts so much talent and so very much money.

Typically, he ascribes his diverse résumé to restlessness and luck. The son of a Yiddish actress and a businessman of varying fortune, Mr. Sheffer studied theater at Brooklyn College and Michigan State. He jokes that he moved from performing to directing to writing in search of "something less passive that you could be in control of - hah!"

In 1978, he and Alan Miller, a conductor, rented the ragged Symphony Movie Theater to put on a Wall to Wall Bach program. Mr. Sheffer had found his professional parking space.

And yes, in bold letters: Bloomsday on Broadway. "After every Bloomsday show, I'm exhausted. Do we have to do it again next year?'' Mr. Sheffer says. "But we have to! It's engraved on the wall that holds us up."